Managing Business Risk

In my last blog, I looked at some external factors that affect the performance and profitability of a business.

Now let’s take a look at internal factors, particularly decisions to be considered around business risks such as bad debts and the loss of a key person in the business.

How To Improve The Profitability Of Your Business

There are many matters that can indirectly affect the performance and therefore the profitability of a business.

During my next series of blogs I would like to talk about some of these issues:

1. External factors – the business at large (such as the economy, industry and legal issues)
2. Internal factors – within the business (e.g. accounting practices and management).

For now, I will look at some business at large factors, in particular industry decisions to be considered around corporate structures, competition and reliance on one industry.

Critical thinking: It’s the thought (process) that counts

The ability to think critically is necessary in order to come up with strategies for your business, and is a key component of business leadership. Knowledge and intelligence are not necessarily prerequisites for thinking critically, although this obviously helps.  Here are some tips for developing this important leadership quality. Thinking Critically Author Greg Haskins (‘A [...]

Profit Improvement Initiatives

One of the key aspects of any business turnaround is, of course, profit improvement. There are many methods of improving profitability, including cost reductions, increasing sale price, outsourcing and improving product mix and gross margins.  I will touch on a few of these techniques in this and future few blogs, and provide some tips on [...]

Strategy Implementation – From thinking it to doing it!

In my last blog I spoke about the two phases a distressed business needs to consider in order to realign their business – phase one is do a strategic review, phase two is implement the turnaround. In this blog I will concentrate on the implementation phase of a turnaround and some problems that I have [...]

First Steps In Turning A Troubled Business

There are many external factors beyond management’s control which can put considerable strain on a business. In all cases, what is critical is not how they got into trouble, but how the business can redefine its strategic direction to mitigate further losses and maintain stakeholder confidence.